11 June 2012

The non-English literary novel continues to be a globalisation
resistant artefact, in an age where it’s the quality of a product and
not where it’s made which normally determines whether we’ll buy it or
not. Figures like Gabriel García Márquez remain exceptions: just try
playing "name three contemporary German novelists we all really enjoy"
at the end of your next dinner party if you need further proof of this
fact. So why should we bother our heads about a recently famous and deservedly so, German literary great? – Sibylle Lewitscharoff, whose 2009 novel
Apostoloff is due out in Katy Derbyshire’s English translation on Seagull Book's German List in December of this year.
Because Lewitscharoff's newest creation, her speech on
accepting the Austrian Arts Award prize this January, can be read as a
compelling manifesto for the future of literature, equally applicable to
novels or plays originally written in Persian, English or German: a
plea for less realism, and more idealism. In doing so she appears
herself to consciously write in the tradition of German idealism; she
also writes for the German Schiller Society. Lastly, Lewitscharoff uses
the speech to demonstrate her likeable, Alan Bennett-esque “I’m not
standing for any old nonsense” quality, in her thinly-veiled attack on
Austria’s 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Elfriede Jelinek.
Nicholas Spice wrote about Jelinek in the London Review of Books in 2008
(here),
praising the work but damning the specific English translation under
review – the novel Greed translated by Martin Chalmers (Serpent’s Tail,
2008). Spice: “It’s hard to imagine that Jelinek’s reputation in the
English-speaking world will ever recover.” In her speech, Lewitscharoff
principally attacks her plays, which stands to reason, as Jelinek’s had
premieres of five new works in German and Austrian theatres since
2009, while her last published novel came out in 2008. What Lewitscharoff calls “atrocity theatre” - a Jelinek play - looks like this on the stage. Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre’s production of The Merchant’s Contract which
premiered 2009 was performed for the last time in Hamburg on 8th
June 2012.
This is what Lewitscharoff thinks of theatre like that –
and what she proposes as a more deserving alternative for our attention:
“With regards to atrocity theatre, which is – let’s please be
clear about this – mostly of aseptic dreariness: this kitsch stopped
being sweet long ago and is now gone sour. The chirpy sparrows, so loved
by Peter Handke, have blasted it clean from the roof-tops with the
strength of their song. People trying to impress us with their
atrocity-wallowing who in their childhoods never got so much as a slap
around the ear. Who brag about having looked into the heart of darkness,
when they’ve never known anything other than rather drab, regular doses
of life, provided for in every way. And who then go and put on the war
paint for a big night out.
I don’t want to name any names in connection with this matter in
this speech; it’s not for me to attack some Austrians who’ve made a
comfy home for themselves amid the pornographic, while skinning bodies,
in grinding bones, in hate-sex, in a deeply ridiculous play-feminism and
in the unceasing activity of Austria bashing.
The annoying thing about literature monsters like this is
that they always march waving the flag of the Enlightenment before them.
They’re telling it like it really is, or so they claim, about the
Darkness of Mankind or of Austrians respectively. Poppycock I say, a
dirty lie. In order to progress towards the heart of darkness, you’ve
also got to be able to describe the wayward goodness of humans. People
are complex, that’s what’s so devilish about them: the sublime and the
loathsome, the generous, the cruel and the beautiful, all living side by
side in different chambers of the heart. Only those who are capable of
capturing at least a part of that complexity deserve our attention and
our affections.
Because – hand on heart – what’s the good of literature, if it
doesn’t conceive the abyss of human turpitude as being anything other
than a transgression, in the constantly new task of establishing
integrity in humans. Treachery against a process of civilisation, which
may only be achieved through perseverance, and to which all the arts
should submit themselves. In a huge and unforeseeable variety of forms,
naturally.”
(Translated from Lewitscharoff speech as printed in the 1/2012 of Volltext, a bi-monthly, print edition Austrian literary newspaper.)
Would David Foster Wallace have disagreed with Lewitscharoff? I
don’t think so. Hard to imagine Franzen disagreeing either. There may be
many good reasons, however, for British novelists being disinclined to
take up the mantle of idealism.